Netflix killing extra queues to “improve” service

Netflix began sending e-mails to customers yesterday evening to inform them of …

Each Netflix account allows the creation of additional profiles, and the DVDs in your subscription plan can be divvied up among them. Unfortunately for its users, the mail-rental outlet has decided to kill the profile feature in just a couple of months, a move that is already prompting an outcry around the Internet.

Profiles allow other family or household members to maintain their own rental queue, rate their own movies, and receive recommendations based on their individual tastes. Many families use the feature to allow the kids to pick out their favorite animated films, for instance, without having to constantly pester dad to add Land Before Time XI: Invasion of the Tinysauruses to the queue. The feature worked quite well for me and my girlfriend—she has a masters in film theory and her taste for French New Wave and Ingmar Bergman doesn't always jibe with my penchant for sci-fi and Adam Sandler comedies.

According to an e-mail sent out to subscribers last night, Netflix is eliminating the convenient feature and removing all additional account profiles in September. And to add insult to injury, the additional profiles cannot be migrated to a new account. So all the effort you may have put in to rating hundreds, if not thousands, of movies and carefully crafting the perfect queue will be obliterated. The rental history will be merged with the main account owner, so your recommendations could suddenly change to reflect other profile users' tastes. And, parents will no longer be able to easily monitor children's rentals if they opt to open a separate account. But, Netflix will happily e-mail you your queue before they delete it so you can manually recreate it if you bothered to sign up for a separate account.

Netflix's new business plan: upset customers by eliminating popular features.

For its part, Netflix is acknowledging that eliminating the profiles may be "disappointing," but says the change is necessary to "continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers." It's not clear how eliminating the feature could improve the site, and Netflix has not yet responded to Ars' request for comment. What is clear, however, is that making it harder to share an account could increase Netflix's bottom line. For instance, if a household is sharing an "4 at-a-time" plan, it costs $24. To have two "2 at-a-time" plans would cost $28.

Though Netflix has enjoyed great success in the DVD-by-mail market, this isn't the first time it has drawn the ire of its customers. It's unknown exactly how popular the profiles feature was, but anecdotally, several of my friends use the feature to keep personal tastes from clashing, and so far folks in our Open Forum seem pretty upset by this latest move. An online petition is already available, with signees agreeing to either move to a cheaper plan, put their account on hold, or cancel their accounts entirely. Netflix must be banking that the improvements to its web site will offset the ill will and lost subscribers that this news has engendered.